[sugar] First impressions of a B4 machine

[Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves]

On 7/24/07, C. Scott Ananian <cscott at cscott.net> wrote:
> RSS is not a proprietary format by any stretch of the imagination.  It
> is a de facto standard, and at times a poorly-documented one

There are three different standards -- let's call them forks -- of
RSS.  One of them is even owned by Netscape as far as I'm aware.

> XSPF is a playlist format: that's not related to RSS at all,
> and I completely understand
> why the newsreader author wouldn't consider support.

I'm afraid you are wrong.  XSPF isn't just any playlist format.  It
doesn't replace RSS on providing basic text+images feeds, but it does
replace RSS when dealing with video and audio.  And PenguinTV is
intended for that latter purpose.

For the hell of it, I'll quote Chris Anderson, Grabb.it CEO, on a
recent message to the XSPF mailing list:

"RSS is designed to act as a dynamic resource that makes keeping up
with changing content easy. It is poorly suited to describing
media-files, about the best it can offer is that such and such media
file is associated with some particular entry.

XSPF is better suited to making collections of media available with
decent metadata. Maybe the best argument for XSPF are the large (and
growing) collections of media available at places like Ross' Digital
Archive Streamer (American folk music) http://waxandwane.org/das/ and
Archive.org.

In creating Grabb.it I am especially sensitive to differences in
metadata quality. RSS-enclosure feeds have been the biggest headache
(treating the item title and description as metadata for the enclosure
is almost always a mistake), whereas most XSPF is about the best
source you can hope for.

Especially in the context of the OLPC, which is designed for
mesh-networks and republishing, a little metadata fidelity goes a long
way."


> "Atom" is a slightly more modern RSS but it hasn't made it through IETF
> standardization yet and RSS feeds are definitely more widespread on
> the internet.

Actually, it already has.  "The Atom syndication format was published
as an IETF 'proposed standard' in RFC 4287"--Wikipedia

Atom is a "better engineered" RSS, so to say,  and an open standard,
but I'm afraid it's unpopular.  If PenguinTV doesn't support it
either, I reckon it's another flaw of the program.

> Because bash implements the POSIX standards, unlike busybox.  Busybox
> is a mistake to use for anything other than very limited use in rescue
> shells and initramfs'en; trying to port "real" programs to use the
> crippled utilities in busybox is a big headache and a huge waste of
> time.

Point taken.  For BusyBox and the non-Glibc libraries.

> There is a lot of software work done to improve battery life, and more
> that will be done.

I wasn't expecting otherwise :)

There's really a lot of smart people in this project, which ultimately
will make this project suceed in a big scale.

-Ivo